Someone had replaced his mask, the edges digging painfully into his skin. He couldn't breathe. He had to get it off. Somewhere nearby, the thudding whir of helicopter blades vibrated his chest. He began clawing at the black mask, desperate to breathe. Metal fingers scraped and peeled at the skin around the mask. The helicopter was getting closer, a high-pitched whine slicing through the deep whomp-whomp-whomp of the blades. He was running out of time. The mask was starting to melt onto his skin. Breath. He needed to breathe. He couldn't breathe—

Bucky shot up, gulping air. He reached for his face. The mask was gone, though he could still hear the droning helicopter. After several heaving breaths, the helicopter became a large black fly, buzzing dumbly from wall to wall. He looked down at himself - drenched in sweat with a few rivulets of dried blood on his chest. There was a matching dark color under his fingernails. He removed his shawl, revealing the shallow gouging around his left shoulder. Sighing, he stood and grabbed an extra scrap of cloth before walking out of the hut.

As he washed his wounds at the water's edge, Bucky tried to ignore the sounds of the African world around him. The insects buzzed incessantly. Monkeys were screaming from the treetops nearby. Frogs chirped and bellowed in the muddy water. And there was a bird. A swooping, high-pitched call that grew louder and louder until he could hear nothing else. Like a siren echoing off of steel gray walls. Gun shots riddled the air and he screamed as several themselves in his back. The siren wailed, bemoaning the very prey it sought to expose. The outside world was as gray and bleak as the hallways of the facility. The snow crunched beneath his boots as the sharp cold of winter added a clarity to his senses. Droplets of blood on the snow as vivid as roses. Crisp air burned its way down his throat, biting at his lips and nose. He could smell the torched scent of gunpowder and fresh snow. And that damned siren–

Bucky gasped as someone touched his hand. Winter faded into summer and the snow sprouted brown grasses. Sunlight and warmth and water resurrected around him. He knew these things…Wakanda. He was in Wakanda.

He looked down at the young boy standing in front of him. No more than 8 years old, with white dots of paint around his eyes, he stared intently at Bucky. The two watched each other for a moment in silence until the boy frowned at the swollen gashes on his shoulder.

"It's ok," Bucky grunted. "It was an accident."

The boy wordlessly walked over to a dry spot in the grass and began digging with his hands. Bucky watched as he shoveled deeper and deeper, until the sandy topsoil was replaced with a rich, dark earth. Then the boy collected as much as he could carry in one hand and brought it to the water's edge. He mixed the dirt with a few drops of water and massaged it into a pasty clay.

"Special Wakanda dirt. It helps," he said and motioned for Bucky to come close.

Bucky knelt so that he was eye-level with the boy and stayed perfectly still while he gently applied the paste with his miniature fingers. To his surprise, a coolness began to soothe his torn skin.

"What happened to your arm?"

Bucky thought for a moment. "It was broken, so they had to take it off."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not anymore." Bucky glanced down at the muddy badge on his shoulder as the boy delicately finished covering all signs of his wounds. "What is your name?"
"N'Wabi. What is your name?"

"Bucky."

He giggled. "Book-ee?" The man chuckled at the boy's amusement and nodded. "Book-ee! That is a silly name."

A group of young boys ran past, a few of them calling for N'Wabi. He shouted back something in Wakandan and turned back one last time to Bucky.

"It feels much better already, N'Wabi. Thank you."

The boy ran off to join the others, with a final, "Bye Bookee!"

He grabbed for his discarded shawl and stood, watching the children run off into the woods. A dark, creeping fear inked into his chest as he wondered how long he had been standing there before N'Wabi touched his hand. What was happening? Why couldn't he tell memory from reality? Had it even been a memory? He sighed, bitterly thinking that he might've preferred no memory at all, compared to this mess.

A crunch in the grass behind him grabbed his attention. She looked concerned.

He glanced down at his muddy chest and raised his hands helplessly. "I can explain."

Her smile burst into a muted giggle. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid, but a few unruly wisps stuck to her bowed lips. A slim, patterned halter top left her shoulders exposed to the sunlight.

"The soil contains trace amounts of radiation from the meteorite," she said. "T'Challa said he used the mud on his entire body once after climbing a tree that belonged to a hive of black-clawed hornets."

Bucky's face twisted. "That sounds awful." He paused, suddenly confused. "Wait, what meteorite?"

Charlotte motioned for his shawl. "Millions of years ago, before Wakanda even existed, this area of Africa was struck by a meteorite made of vibranium," she explained as she gently tied his wrap around his shoulders. "It's the metal that Steve's shield is made of."

Bucky knew he should've sounded more impressed, but all he could mumble was, "Small world."

He glanced down at her bare shoulders as she finished tying his shawl. For the first time, Bucky saw the true extent of her scar as it split down from her neck and spread across her shoulder and chest. Delicate, almost flowery fingers branched off from the main stalk of the scar. As if the shape of lightning had been seared into her skin.

She finished tying his shawl and stepped back, almost self-consciously.

"I was hoping you were sleeping in this morning."

He shook his head. "Been a long night."

Her eyes darted to his wounded shoulder. "We don't have to continue. If today's not a good day—"

"Charlotte, if we wait for me to have a good day, we could both be stuck here for a long time."

She opened her mouth, but Bucky could tell that whatever she was about to say evaporated into something else. "Would that be such a bad thing? Or are you sick of me already?" She laughed at his expression. "Come on. Let's walk."

They roamed the surrounding countryside for the better part of the day, through tangled woods, sun-drenched fields, grasslands and gurgling rivers. They spoke little – a more detailed explanation of exactly what a black-clawed hornet was left Bucky regretting that he'd asked at all – and spent most of their trek in silence. If Charlotte was in any pain today, she was concealing it well. He kept a close eye on her, watching for any hitch in her gait or change in her breathing, and a slight guilt razed his chest for doing so. It felt eerily familiar, like tracking a target. Like looking for a weakness.

As they were walking through a meadow of grasses and thorny shrubs, a sudden, stiff wind tossed a wave of dirt and sand into the air. Charlotte disappeared behind a veil of dust and Bucky shut his eyes against his own hair as it whipped at his face.

"Soldat!"

His eyes snapped open. The broad man with blonde eyebrows held his fist high, red and wet with blood.

"Ne atakovat!"

He raised his arms to defend himself but the movement was jagged, undercut by the conflicting words that were feeding from his earpiece.

"Ne atakovat!"

Seeing his chance, the blonde punched a heavy uppercut into the winter soldier's ribs while disarming him of his knife. Newly armed, he lunged at his opponent in the black mask and sank the knife deep into his thigh.

The winter soldier roared, a muffled, strangled sound behind the mask, and redoubled his efforts with blinding ferocity. He had the man by the throat, the metal prosthetic whirring as he began to crush veins and skin in an effort to reach bone buried deep within.

"NE ATAKOVAT." DO NOT ATTACK.

He dropped his opponent to the ground and took several steps back, impassively watching as he sputtered and gasped back to life.

The man in black mask said the only words he knew how to. "Ya gotov otvecha." Ready to comply.

"Podozhdite." Wait.

He did as he was told, even as his adversary towered to his full height and drew back another rounded fist. The blow was heavy and hard and he could feel a sharp crack as a tooth split within his jaw despite the industrial-grade mask. His adversary forced him against a wall and continued to throw thick fists into the soldier's face and hurl mammoth strikes into his chest. Another blow to the face ripped the mask off his face, leaving him exposed to the mercy of his opponent.

Something in him was dying. Some thin, conscious instinct to defend himself. His body ached to fight, to run, to escape. To live. Yet the wires and anchors and black fields of his mind caught and smothered every impulse until he no longer recognized them. The soldier took every blow silently, willingly, until his face was so slippery with his own blood that his opponent's fists slid off his skin.

He finally collapsed onto the floor, ruined and wheezing against a shattered ribcage. Through his skin, he could feel the cold floor vibrate as men entered the room, talking in low voices that he couldn't hear. He lay motionless until someone grabbed a fistful of his hair and peeled his face away from the floor.

"Soldat?"

The asset gurgled incoherently, blood bubbling from his mouth.

"Ya ne uveren. Potrebovalos' tri popytki yego kontrolirovat." I am not convinced. It took three attempts to control him.

"My poprosili yego lishit'sya tseli. Umeret'. Ya vpechatlen, eto ne zanyalo bol'she." We asked him to forfeit a target. To die. I am impressed it did not take more.

"My ne prosim. My komanduyem." We do not ask. We command.

The soldier finally lost consciousness and his handler dropped his head to the floor, unceremoniously.

"Ubedites', chto kazhdyy, kto nakhoditsya v odnoy komnate s nim, vooruzhen. Yesli yego zhizn' ne nasha, chtoby komandovat', to eto nasha zhizn'." Ensure that anyone who is in the same room as him is armed. If his life is not ours to command, then it is ours to take.

"Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu."

He blinked and suddenly found himself squinting against the flaring orange sun as it hovered just above the horizon. He turned away from the blinding light and froze at the sight of the young woman standing a few feet away.

"Do you know me?"

Guilt sliced through him as she asked the question he wished she didn't have to.

"Charlotte."

He saw her breathe a sigh of relief and his guilt deepened.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to spring that on you, but I needed to…reach you."

Bucky took note of the long shadows on the ground and glanced back towards the fading sun. "How long have we been out here?"

"A while. Probably because I couldn't figure out how to say the damn word."

He grinned and found her doing the same. The burning light from the sun ignited the iridescent copper in her hair. A golden glow warmed her face and shadows played in the hollows of her shoulders. Those slender shoulders that had nestled so comfortably against his chest as he had carried her from the floor of his hut to the cot…

He shook his head. "It feels like it's getting worse."

"Because you're getting better." He gave her an odd look. "The electrical patterns in your brain are changing. The more control restored to you, the more memories you regain. But that's almost 80 years' worth of memory to unravel. No one is going to blame you if you're a little...confused."

Bucky huffed, "Thanks." Then, with deepening realization, a thought occurred to him as he watched the sun slowly set on another African day. "I am going to be here a while, aren't I?" Her magnetic eyes, dark and disorienting, held his gaze while she seemed to contemplate her next words.

"I was here for 8 months. Granted, I was relearning how to walk and eat and breathe, but after two or three months I had physically recovered. But I was afraid to leave."

Bucky frowned. "What were you afraid of?"

"Me. All of a sudden I was this volatile energy cannon that was in so much physical agony I considered throwing myself from a cliff on an almost daily basis. I didn't trust myself. I was convinced that if I went back into the world like this, I was going to hurt someone."

The former assassin nodded slowly, remembering her words by the waterfall.

I'm afraid of hurting you. Of causing pain.

"How'd you overcome it?" he asked, though he already knew the answer. It was also his answer.

She smiled, almost sadly, and Bucky swallowed back the impulse to reach out and touch her.

"I didn't."

A/N: There are not enough Bucky Barnes memes/Stucky references/Sebastian Stan goodness bites on the entire internet to thank all of you who continue to read this story in between my heinously long hiatuses.